I was impressed with an ad I saw for the new Zoom Q3Hd video recorder. It stated that “Flips are for kids.” I smiled and thought it was very clever. The new camera hits stores this month. A new video recorder from Zoom meant they had finally come to the conclusion that no matter how good their external microphones are, people wanted the ability to plug in external microphones. At least that's what I thought.

When I read the details, I was pleased to see where they made it so it shoots better in low light, has a bigger screen, and you can turn it sideways and use it 4x DIGITAL ZOOM. It runs on standard batteries, or rechargeable. They are obviously very proud of their external microphones. They should be, I have a Zoom H4 and they sound great for recording live events (so musicians, this would be great for recording gigs – unless you wanted to capture the sound from the mixer).The price of this new unit is $299, so its a great unit for people looking to capture live events. But if you want to do interviews, and not get all the background noise, you'll have to record your audio using a lapel mic, and plug it into you H4 and sync the audio and video later.

Zoom, people love to have options. One of the best portable recorders when podcasting first came on the scene was the iriver 899. Why? You could input an external microphone.